Nick & Charlotte's Art and Drawings

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October Project: Circus book

With the advent of a monthly “Drawing Salon”, there is the opportunity to structure time for a big project for each month. Last month, I worked on a long pose picture of Charlotte – it is, however, not yet complete – so not posted yet.

On the 1st of this month, Jake ran the “Drawing Circus” event – a day event of life drawing, with a circus theme and a storyline. Knowing in advance the scale of this event, I purchased a concertina sketchbook (right) in order to have all the days drawings in one combined place. This is a new experience for me, as I never normally use sketchbooks, preferring to draw on free sheets of A2 or A3 paper.

The concertina sketchbook is good for this, because as the pages can be folded out to a continuous piece of paper, I am not restricted by the size of the page width, and can have different sketches relating to each other rather than separated out into different pages. Knowing some of the circus set art, because I had been helping paint and prepare them, I prepared in advance some decoration for the sketchbook – the knife-throwers star on the left. This was as a front and side motif on the sketchbook cover, and I will post proper shots of it once the project is complete.

On the day of Circus, I got a lot of drawing done – because I wanted to try and capture the whole narrative of the story, and because different poses were of different lengths, I ended up doing an awful lot of short 3-10 minute drawings. In total, I ended up doing 71 sketched poses!

So, that leaves the question: What exactly is there to do for this months project? Answer: A lot! My plans include selective colouring for the important roles (i.e. the monkeys fez is red), a whole plethora of backgrounds and scenery to draw in (I was good and kept myself drawing the poses, but leaving blank spaces most of the time for planned scenery) and finally text – I left a blank page for each ‘Act’ and intend to include a storyline summary – so this entails practicing some calligraphy. In addition, I have a few pages at the back to fill to finish the whole sketchbook, and have yet to fully decide what to do with these.

So, I have a fun months work ahead of me (oops, that month has turned into three weeks now…..)